TradeEdge

By Jason Kim · Branch Manager · 15 years in freight forwarding · Los Angeles · Frankfurt · Chicago Published on TradeEdge | Practical freight forwarding, customs, and import/export guidance written from 15 years of real logistics operations. In Fiscal Year 2025, U.S. Customs and Border Protection recovered $26 billion in additional duty from entry summary reviews — the audits CBP conducts to confirm imported goods were correctly classified and valued. The year before, that number was $667.5 million . That is a 39× jump in twelve months . If you import into the United States and have not changed the way you classify your products, you are walking into the most aggressive customs enforcement environment in modern American trade history armed with a 10-digit code that you probably guessed. This post is the antidote. Why I'm writing this now There are roughly 11,000 licensed customs brokers in the United States. There are nearly 25,000 freight forwarders. There ar...

In April 2026, the average truck turn time at the Port of Long Beach was 55 minutes. Vessel anchorage wait was 0.08 days — essentially zero. Every gate was open. Cargo was moving. If you are an importer who lived through 2021 and 2022, that sentence reads like fiction. It is not fiction. It is the current operational reality at America's busiest container port. And it is precisely the kind of calm that experienced freight professionals treat with the most caution — because the ports that are smoothest in May are almost always the ones that are most congested by October. I have been managing freight operations across Los Angeles, Frankfurt, and Chicago for fifteen years. I have coordinated shipments through the worst port congestion in modern US trade history. And the most valuable lesson I took from every one of those experiences is this: the importers who survive port congestion are not the ones who respond best when it hits. They are the ones who prepared before it arrived. T...

In January 2026, one carrier alliance delivered 89.5 percent of its vessels on schedule. Another delivered 57 percent. That 32-percentage-point gap is the largest reliability spread between alliance groupings ever recorded in the history of commercial container shipping. And it means that where you choose to book your next container is no longer just a rate decision. It is an operational decision with real consequences for your inventory, your warehouse schedule, your customer promises, and your demurrage bill. I have been managing freight operations for fifteen years across Los Angeles, Frankfurt, and Chicago. I work daily with carriers across multiple alliances. I have watched clients receive containers that arrived on schedule — and I have watched a consistent late arrival pattern on a specific lane force a client to switch carriers entirely after losing confidence in the ETA they were planning their business around. The data that Sea-Intelligence published for early 2026 is the ...

On April 9, 2025, the effective tariff rate on most Chinese goods imported into the United States briefly reached 145 percent. Not 14.5 percent. One hundred and forty-five percent. To put that number in context: a shipment of consumer electronics with a $100,000 customs value would have generated $145,000 in combined duties — more than the goods themselves were worth. In a single executive order, the economics of sourcing from China did not change. They inverted. I have been managing freight operations across Los Angeles, Frankfurt, and Chicago for fifteen years. In that time I have lived through the Section 301 tariff escalation of 2018 and 2019, the COVID-era supply chain chaos of 2020 and 2021, and the 2025 tariff cycle that made all of it look orderly by comparison. Nothing I have witnessed across my entire career matches the speed and scale of what happened to importers between April and December of 2025. This guide explains exactly what happened, what the tariff landscape loo...